The latest book in a series that seeks to illuminate Francis Bacon's art and motivations and open up fresh and stimulating ways of understanding his paintings.

BACON AND THE MIND: ART, NEUROSCIENCE AND PSYCHOLOGY. HarrisonMartin. Thames & Hudson. 2019. pp 160. £28.00.

This article is primarily concerned with the philosophical problems that arise out of a consideration of painting. By painting I mean of course not any kind of application of paint to a surface – house painting for instance – but painting as an art, to use Richard Wollheim's phrase. Since Plato, philosophy has intermittently been concerned with these problems, and over the past 30 years, painting has come under a new focus as philosophy (...) of art has increasingly turned its attention to the issues that arise from particular art forms. I will also draw on some ideas developed in art history and theory, which have a suitably philosophical, that is, general or foundational, character. There are many philosophical issues that arise equally from painting and other art forms, but for just this reason, they are best addressed in a broader cross-art-form context, and I will mostly avoid dealing with them here. Instead, I will focus on issues that arise solely or with a special force from a consideration of painting. It will be helpful to roughly arrange these in two categories. The first is representation; the second is form. We shall see that these categories are difficult to keep separate with regard to painting and overlap at various points. (shrink)

There is wide research about the Philosophy for/with Children program. However, there is not any known attempt to investigate how a philosophical discussion can be implemented through a museum workshop. The present research aims to discuss aesthetic and epistemological issues with primary school children through a temporary art exhibition in a museum in Cyprus. Certainly, paintings have been used successfully to connect philosophical topics with the experiences of the children. We suggest, though, that this is not as innovative as (...) the conduction of a dialogue in a museum. Results were mostly positive. Pupils participated in the discussion and they gave intensive definitions of beautiful paintings and counterexamples for given definitions. The structure of inductive arguments and the difference between belief and knowledge were discussed. Progress in the analysis of inductive arguments was slightly noticeable, but it is likely that this was due to limited time spent on analysing those arguments. Furthermore, more sessions are needed to make generalisations for the effectiveness of the Philosophy for Children program in a museum instead of a traditional classroom. Even though there is discussion about the different stimuli of the discussion, it might be worth considering the effectiveness of different contexts where the discussion can take place. (shrink)

Up to now, China's painting has not completely shaken off the influence of the spirit of European philosophy or a fundamental change in the way of viewing. The spirit of the unity of subject and object in ancient China philosophy influenced the formation and development of China's paintings. Since China Art Institute introduced figurative expressionism, a new art, into the contemporary art education system of China, it has shown its unique value in professional theory and practical skills. (...) It not only provides new opportunities for reforming contemporary art education in China but also adds a new development direction for contemporary oil painting art in China. This article attempts to reveal the existence and artistic concept of violence in contemporary Chinese oil painting through the description and analysis of painting images and artists' emotional expression, combined with interviews with artists. Based on the development of contemporary Chinese society, the rise of new literary and artistic trends, and the influence of western painting, this paper analyses the historical causes of violence in contemporary Chinese oil painting, and examines the value of contemporary Chinese oil painting in terms of aesthetics and sociology. Therefore, establishing cultural core values is still the indispensable spiritual power of contemporary artists' artistic creation. (shrink)

Some chapters revisions of works previously issued 2004-2016.

Western philosophy has been defined through the exclusion of non-Western forms of thought as non-philo-sophical. In this paper, I place the notion of what is “properly” philosophy into question by contrasting the essence/appearance paradigm governing Western metaphysics and its deconstructive critics with the more fluid, dynamic, and participatory forms of encountering and performatively enacting the world that are articulated in Chinese thinking and made apparent in Chinese painting. In this hermeneutical contrast, Western and Chinese thinking themselves are (...) interpeted as co-relational rather than as discrete, mutually indifferent or ethnocentrically nativist traditions. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Painting examines the practice of painting - how a painter works with materials, the elements of space, form and color - and viewer response to a work of art. Nigel Wentworth seeks to answer some of the central questions of the philosophy of art, such as: To what extent can a painting and its meaning be understood to result from the artist's intentions? In what way can the painting be understood as an (...) expressive object? What does it mean for a painting to be a representation of something? And what is the nature of aesthetic quality in painting? In offering responses to these questions, Wentworth offers a new theory on aesthetic quality. (shrink)

Comment on “Ansai peasant paintings: inheritance of Chinese primitive culture and primitive philosophy”.

There are as many meanings to drawing and painting as there are cultural contexts for them to exist in. But this is not the end of the story. Drawings and paintings are made, and in their making embody unique meanings that transform our perception of space-time and sense of finitude. These meanings have not been addressed by art history or visual studies hitherto, and have only been considered indirectly by philosophers. If these intrinsic meanings are explained and further developed, (...) then the philosophy of art practice is significantly enhanced. The present work, accordingly, is a phenomenology of how the gestural and digital creation of visual imagery generates self-transformation through aesthetic space. (shrink)

Richard Wollheim is one of the dominant figures in the philosophy of art, whose work has shown not only how paintings create their effects but why they remain important to us. His influential writings have focused on two core, interrelated questions: how do paintings depict? And how do they express feelings? In this collection of essays a distinguished group of thinkers in the fields of art history and philosophical aesthetics offers a critical assessment of Wollheim's theory of art. Among (...) the themes under discussion are Wollheim's explanation of pictorial representation in terms of seeing-in, his views of artistic expression as a type of complex projection, and his notion of the internal spectator. In the final essay Wollheim himself responds to the contributors. This book will be eagerly sought out by all serious students of the theory of art, whether in departments of philosophy or art history. (shrink)

A provocative examination of the artistic interpretation of twelve of Borges’s most famous stories.

Richard Wollheim is one of the dominant figures in the philosophy of art, whose work has shown not only how paintings create their effects but why they remain important to us. His influential writings have focused on two core, interrelated questions: How do paintings depict? and how do they express feelings? In this collection of new essays a distinguished group of thinkers in the fields of art history and philosophical aesthetics offers a critical assessment of Wollheim's theory of art. (...) Among the themes under discussion are Wollheim's explanation of pictorial representation in terms of seeing-in, his views of artistic expression as a type of complex projection, and his notion of the internal spectator. In the final essay Wollheim himself responds to the contributors. This book will be eagerly sought out by all serious students of the theory of art, whether in departments of philosophy or art history. (shrink)

What painting does -- Systems of art historical and philosophical thought -- The place of painting: Velazquez's Las Meninas -- The limits of irony: Manet's painting -- The negativity of painting: Magritte's this is not a pipe -- Painting in the light of photography: Fromanger's methods.

In this paper I shall present an argument against Deleuze’s philosophy of painting. Deleuze’s main thesis in Logic of Sensation is twofold: [1] he claims that painting is based on a non-representational level; and [2] he claims that this level comes out of the materiality of painting. I shall claim that Deleuze’s theses should be rejected for the following reasons: first, the difference between non-intentional life and the representational world is too strict. I submit that the (...) non-intentional relation that painting opens up is itself part of and emerges out of the representational force of painting. If this would not be the case, then the criterion for differentiating between paintings and other objects cannot be developed. Indeed, Deleuze fails to give us a criterion. Second, Deleuze’s way of dealing with materiality in painting remains unsatisfactory, insofar as he is unable to take into account how materiality is charged with an “attitude towards the world.” In sum, materiality can only be painting’s materiality if we understand it as being formed and disclosed in representation. (shrink)

We humans continuously reshape the environment to alter, enhance, and sustain our affective lives. This two-way modification has been discussed in recent philosophy of mind as affective scaffolding, wherein scaffolding quite literally means that our affective states are enabled and supported by environmental resources such as material objects, other people, and physical spaces. In this article, I will argue that under certain conditions paintings function as noteworthy affective scaffolds to their creators. To expound this idea, I will begin with (...) a theoretical overview of affective niche construction and affective scaffolding. Then, based on the criteria of robustness, concreteness, and dependability, I will specify a solid type of affective scaffolding and propound paintings as a cogent case of such. In support of my argument, I will highlight two feelings typical to painterly creativity: the feeling of aesthetic resonance and the feeling of fusion. To conclude, I will discuss the overall contributions and limitations of my account. (shrink)

Many artists and scientists - including Buffon, Goethe, and Philipp Otto Runge - who observed the vividly coloured shadows that appear outdoors around dawn and dusk, or indoors when a candle burns under waning daylight, chose to describe their colours as 'beautiful'. Paul Smith explains what makes these ephemeral effects worthy of such appreciation - or how depictions of coloured shadows have genuine aesthetic and epistemological significance. This multidisciplinary book synthesises methodologies drawn from art history, psychology and neuroscience, history of (...) science, and philosophy. This title will be of interest to scholars in art history, art theory, and the history of science and technology. (shrink)

For Anselm Kiefer, his painting shows that, that something exists “shows that there is also nothingness.” The moment of visibility is also the moment of our exposure in/with/through nothing (in a gerundive sense) elemental in the happening of the visible. Painting bears ways of exposing the becoming of the visible and ultimately of consciousness, both sensible and intellectual, in/through/with emptying and nothing, i.e., in the happening of the seer and the seen, in that coming into being of existing, (...) we are exposed to the insight that “there is also nothingness.” The paper offers a series of transpositions, a series of ways of experiencing visibility and vision found in looking at specific images and paintings. The transpositions expose us to blindness, emptying, gaps, and loss in the happening of the visible, which, in displacing the certainty of rational subjective seeing/consciousness, lead to the quickening of vision and the visible anew. (shrink)

Whether you play basketball, coach it, or just love to watch it, this book will forever enrich your understanding and appreciation of the game.

Ecology is a major international issue of the present moment because the earth is threatened by forces beyond our control that have potential devastating consequences. This essay looks at the problem through the eyes of the Zen master Dðgen and selected postmodern philosophers. The difference between them is evident by Dðgen’s planful statement about eating a painting of a rice cake. Postmodernists perceives nature as a social construct connected to a representational mode of thinking that conflicts with the postmodern (...) emphasis on difference, simulation, planes without depth and lack of unity. These postmodern tendencies of thinking are contrary to the philosophy of Dðgen, whose image of a painting of a rice cake can satisfy intellectual hunger and serves as a serious way to save the ecological system and overcome the representational mode of thinking. (shrink)

Focusing on the “bian” (changes) of Chinese landscape painting in the Tang Dynasty, this essay seeks to expound a breakthrough in the study of painting in the dynasty. Such a study was once difficult to carry out in the form of pictorial and stylistic analyses due to the lack of physical works. By showing that the prevailing landscape paintings of two representative painters Wu Daozi and Li Sixun were at the time most likely to be dominated by the (...) sutra paintings and pictures of the immortal land, the essay attempts to demonstrate that the meaning of “changes” in landscape painting lies more in the change of style in representing landscape and the attitude of critics towards landscape paintings than in the change of subject matter. Meanwhile, it is worth noting that historical narratives also played a key role in constituting the concept of “landscape painting.” The focus on and analysis of the historical constitution itself provide people with another possible and feasible research approach in addition to the one based on the analysis of works and images. (shrink)

The author analyzes the theme of painting in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, referring to one of his defining works on this subject: "Truth in Painting". Consistently considering the four-part structure of this book, the author touches on such concepts of deconstruction as "parergon", "passepartout", "cartouche" and others. Of particular interest is the problem of truth in the structure of fine art – this topic is a cross-cutting theme throughout Derrida's work. At the same time, the philosopher (...) rejects the classical ontological-epistemological aspect of truth in the context of art history. The picture does not limit itself to the representation of an object or the truth attached to it. She crosses the line, overflowing her boundaries. That is why the logic of a work of art is inevitably the logic of a Kantian parergon. In the book "Truth in Painting" Derrida rethinks all aspects of artistic creativity. For Derrida, painting is, first of all, an action and the most correct question is: "What does this painting do?". The picture in the produced action breaks away from the conditions of the image, moves away from the discourse, setting in motion the difference. The structure of a painting work consists not of presence or representation, but of a projection of movement. The painting is silent and remains outside the language, is unrepresentable and heterogeneous, is out of line with any discourse, is irreducible to any text and is not subject to archiving despite all the efforts of museum authorities. (shrink)

According to Marxist philosophy, everything in the world is universally connected and in perpetual motion. Chinese society has gone through a long history of civilizational development. Since the modern era (1840-1919), great changes have taken place in the civilizational development of China. The transformation of social forms depends on the transformation of culture, and the approximation of culture to modernity is a prerequisite for the modernization of society. Thus, the development of society inevitably causes changes in art and culture; (...) and vice versa, the progress of art and culture, in turn, contributes to the progress of society. A clear and complex line has been traced in the development of Chinese painting over the centuries: from a high degree of integration to gradual differentiation leading to conflict, and then to integration. The development of Chinese painting as a whole shows a transformational trend from tradition to modernity, developing in a tortuous way. In this paper, a combination of research methods is used for research, mainly documentary research, descriptive research, comparative research and case study. Considering the features and trends of Chinese painting at different stages of development, we can more accurately judge the direction of development of modern Chinese painting and find ways to integrate tradition and modernity. (shrink)

Ecology is a major international issue of the present moment because the earth is threatened by forces beyond our control that have potential devastating consequences. This essay looks at the problem through the eyes of the Zen master Dðgen and selected postmodern philosophers. The difference between them is evident by Dðgen’s planful statement about eating a painting of a rice cake. Postmodernists perceives nature as a social construct connected to a representational mode of thinking that conflicts with the postmodern (...) emphasis on difference, simulation, planes without depth and lack of unity. These postmodern tendencies of thinking are contrary to the philosophy of Dðgen, whose image of a painting of a rice cake can satisfy intellectual hunger and serves as a serious way to save the ecological system and overcome the representational mode of thinking. (shrink)

Although the three sections contain essays written from a wide spectrum of viewpoints, they emphasize, respectively, the important connections of Merleau-Ponty's thought to that of Derrida and Levinas, the Husserlian heritage and complex implications of his philosophy of material existence, and the relation of his philosophy of painting to contemporary abstract art. A distinguishing feature of this collection is its emphasis on contemporaneity.

Violence has always accompanied human societies, and appeared in various forms of artworks such as movie, painting, and even cave art, but Persian painting by showing the utopian calm images surprisingly kept itself away from representing the violence, even in the scenes of war and slaughter. This paper aims to study the Persian painting –with focus on the early Safavid dynasty as the age of glory of Iranian art- on the basis of Žižek’s theory, to show that (...) invisible violence floated in Persian painting regardless of its extreme calm beauty and its different context from contemporary philosophy. Žižek categorizes the violence into three modes: visible subjective, and two modes of objective violence -Symbolic and Systematic - which are invisible and flow in latter layers. By going to deeper level of creation and content of Persian images which were illustrated in the court and on the command of rulers of the time, it is concluded that some elements of invisible violence such as strict law, visual symbols like “Qizilbash Hat”, the issue of the language, neighbor, fear of error, repetition of historical characters, extremism and nonviolent situation can be analyzed in the content or illustration of Persian Painting. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the philosophy of painting, though widely influential and much discussed, remain enigmatic. In this paper I compare his views on painting with those of his older contemporary, Jacques Maritain, who also holds that painting can give us a non-conceptual insight into deep truths about things that are inaccessible to discursive thought. I argue that some ideas that are obscure and undeveloped in Merleau-Ponty are developed more clearly and fully in Maritain. Even where there (...) are significant differences between them, these are not as great as it might at first seem. This comparison can help us to see the ways in which both philosophers’ theories of art are important for understanding their philosophies as a whole. Furthermore, the views they hold in common can continue to suggest a plausible and fruitful way to think about art today. (shrink)

Anthony Rudd’s Painting and Presence: Why Paintings Matter is a monograph that spans the categories of aesthetics, philosophy of art, and religion. Rudd takes t.

This 4000 word essay was selected for a special issue of 'Image & Narrative' (Issue 18, September 2007), on 'Thinking Pictures', guest edited by Hanneke Grootenboer, author of 'The Rhetoric of Perspective' (University of Chicago Press, 2005). 'Image & Narrative' is a peer-reviewed e-journal on visual narratology, with essays reviewed by at least two members of the editorial board. The essay addresses contemporary arguments on spectatorship within the philosophy of art. It examines different ways by which internal and external (...) spectators negotiate painting's two perspectives: the absent scene represented by the picture's marked surface and the external point of view of a beholder, standing in real space. The essay argues that if the imaginative engagement provided by an internal spectator (see Wollheim) renders the picture plane transparent, so that we might enter the virtual space of the painting, then in paintings integrated into their architectural contexts the surface plays a semantic role in both connecting and separating different realms. If the picture surface disappears for the internal spectator, then for works integrated into their architectural settings its status is heightened and negated as a threshold separating spatiotemporal realms. The essay challenges semiotic accounts of painting. While linguistic derived semiotic accounts negate a spatial engagement, in Hubert Damisch's proposal that painting is a form of thinking, structure emerges from within the loop of the perspective paradigm. The essay argues, however, that if certain paintings 'think', they do so only in the sense that thought permeates a phenomenological whole where perception and imagination merge. The essay is a development of 'A spatiality of situation', published by Art In-sight, Filmwaves magazine (no. 31, 2006), guest edited with Adam Kossoff. A related paper, 'Levels of Reality', was given at the 'Real Things: matter, materiality, representation' conference at the University of York, 5-8 July 2007. (shrink)

Riassunto: La filosofia originale cinese è una sublimazione della coscienza culturale umana di base - la coscienza della vita e della riproduzione - che è l’unificazione del “Concetto di yin e yang” e del “Concetto di ciclo di vita “ in cui “lo yin e lo yang si uniscono per creare tutte le cose, e il ciclio dà una vita senza fine. La cultura originale cinese determina la visione filosofica, la visione artistica, il temperamento emotivo, la benessere psicologica e lo (...) spirito nazionale della nazione cinese. Il sistema filosofico cinese, che rappresenta l’unificazione della cosmologia, dell’epistemologia e della metodologia della nazione cinese, è un sistema filosofico completo e maturo che si è formato nella società tardo primitiva molto prima delle Dinastie Xia, Shang e Zhou. La cultura originale cinese, dalla cultura della ceramica dipinta di 7.000 anni fa fino ai giorni nostri, dalla cultura archeologica sotterranea alla cultura di massa terrestre, è un concetto ampio di belle arti, determinato da una visione filosofica dell’arte plastica di osservare gli oggetti e prendere immmagini. La cultura originale e la filosofia originale della Cina primitiva sono ancora conservate in un’eredità storica estremamente ricca e completa nella vita sociale della cultura di massa. Per questo motivo la Cina è l’unico Paese tra le civiltà antiche che non aver subito una frattura culturale. (shrink)

A collection of essays on Wollheim's philosophy of art; includes a response from Wollheim himself.

Comprised of 45 chapters, written especially for this volume by an international team of leading experts, The Routledge Companion to the Philosophies of Painting and Sculpture is the first handbook of its kind. The editors have organized the chapters helpfully across eight parts: I: Artforms II: History III: Questions of Form, Style, and Address IV: Art and Science V: Comparisons among the Arts VI: Questions of Value VII: Philosophers of Art VIII: Institutional Questions Individual topics include art and cognitive (...) science, evolutionary origins of art, art and perception, pictorial realism, artistic taste, style, issues of race and gender, art and religion, art and philosophy, and the end of art. The work of selected philosophers is also discussed, including Diderot, Hegel, Ruskin, Gombrich, Goodman, Wollheim, and Danto. With a volume introduction from the editors and comprehensively indexed, The Routledge Companion to the Philosophies of Painting and Sculpture serves as a point of entry to the subject for a broad range of students as well as an up-to-date reference for scholars in the field. (shrink)

Analyzing Montaigne's triptych painting, “Of the Education of Children,” reveals a series of ever-morphing, Dorian Gray–like canvases that depict metaphor mutations through which Montaigne defined education by distinguishing between schooling a child into a learned man and educating him into an able, active, and gentle person. Montaigne used metaphor and metaphor clusters to image key points in his educational philosophy, advanced his argument by intertwining, transmuting, and inverting metaphors, and thereby drew and vividly painted his philosophy of (...) how to educate a person from cradle to coffin. Because the etymology and pronunciation of “essay” (from the French essai) support Montaigne's imaging and exploiting of this genre's creative potential, Virginia Worley begins by considering the term's etymology before positioning her analysis of Montaigne's work within metaphor research. She then examines the metaphors Montaigne used to paint the triptych word painting that embodies his philosophy of education: the meaning and value of educating in and for the art of living well. (shrink)

Authentic objects are those that have a historical link to a person, event, time, or place of some significance. The current study examines everyday beliefs about authentic objects, with three primary goals: to determine the scope of adults' evaluation of authentic objects, to examine such evaluation in two distinct cultural settings, and to determine whether a person's attachment history predicts evaluation of authentic objects. We found that college students in the UK and the USA consistently evaluate a broad range of (...) authentic items as more valuable than matched control objects, more desirable to keep, and more desirable to touch, though only non-personal authentic items were judged to be more appropriate for display in a museum. These patterns were remarkably similar across the two cultural contexts. Additionally, those who had an attachment object as a child evaluated objects more favorably, and in particular judged authentic objects to be more valuable. Altogether, these results demonstrate broad endorsement of "positive contagion" among college-educated adults. (shrink)

Painting can only be thought in relation to the image. And yet, with (and within) painting what continues to endure is the image of painting. While this is staged explicitly in, for example, paintings of St. Luke by artists of the Northern Renaissance—e.g., Rogier van der Weyden, Jan Gossaert, and Simon Marmion—the same concerns are also at work within both the practices as well as the contemporaneous writings that define central aspects of the Italian Renaissance. The aim (...) of this paper is to begin an investigation into the process by which painting stages the activity of painting. This forms part of a project whose aim is an investigation of the way philosophy should respond to the essential historicity of art (where the latter is understood philosophically). (shrink)

[Winner of the American Philosophical Association’s 2024 Journal of Value Inquiry Prize.] My thesis is that certain non-verbal paintings such as Picasso’s GUERNICA make (simple) arguments. If this is correct and the arguments are reasonably good, it would indicate one way that non-literary art can be cognitively valuable, since argument can provide the justification needed for knowledge or understanding. The focus is on painting, but my findings seem applicable to comparable visual art forms (a sculpture is also considered). My (...) approach largely consists of identifying pertinent features of viable literary cognitivism and then showing how they or close analogues can be applied to non-verbal painting. The two main features are the requirements, first, that the relevant knowledge is provided significantly in virtue of the distinctive essential feature of literary fictions, i.e., their fictionality, and second, that the knowledge stems primarily from the content of the work, not from what the auditor brings to the work. Some ways that literary fiction has been taken to be argumentative are explained, and striking similarities are found between argumentative literary fiction and argumentative painting. Potential objections are addressed, and I examine a proposed way to express, in a schematized format, both the power of an argumentative painting and its relatively simple associated propositional content. (shrink)

In contemporary Chinese art the national traditions and modern trends of the art world are especially relevant. Since the 1980s, in the works of a number of authors, interest began to manifest itself in the techniques of silk work, which was characteristic of ancient and medieval painting on scrolls, which was later replaced by more accessible drawings on paper. At the present stage, such painting has reached its heyday and is highly appreciated in the art market. The most (...) famous masters engaged in silk painting are Mu Yilin and Dong Wenzheng. The analysis of their creations allows us to see how the artists discovered the expressive possibilities of this material, including its transparency, refraction, color and tone saturation. The object of attention is the Chinese tradition of painting on silk, and the subject is the features of its development at the beginning of the XXI century on the example of the work of famous artists and the options they take into account in the compositions of techniques, figurative structure and expressive means of the old masters. The purpose of the article is to identify the main themes and artistic means that modern artists use in their silk works, as well as the option of integrating an ethno-cultural component into their work. (shrink)